1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to electronic marketplace that facilitates electronic trade, more particularly to trade credibility of participants.
2. Description of Prior Art
Electronic Commerce enables trade participants to initiate trade, and exchange trade related information electronically to improve the efficiency of the transaction. Electronic commerce helps in reducing latency in a transaction lifecycle and also reducing manual intervention with automated processes. Marketplaces are where participants initiate a trade and carry out a transaction provided requirements of all the parties meet. An Electronic Marketplace or an online exchange provides tools to facilitate electronic commerce between trade participants. There are different types of exchanges depending upon type of transactions and participants e.g. one-to many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. One-to-many exchange can be Online-Procurement system wherein there is one buyer and many vendors preferred or otherwise. Many-to-one business exchange can be Online Sales system where there is one supplier and many buyers. Many-to-many business exchange can be an online-product or online-service exchange where there are many buyers and many suppliers controlling the transactions by the supply-demand forces. Similarly, depending upon participants, exchange can be private or public. Private exchange involves fixed group of known participants. Public exchange involves any suitable participant with trade done anonymously or with disclosed identity.
Even though electronic commerce and electronic marketplaces are introduced to reduce manual intervention and increase efficiency, there still exist interventions and process latencies that add to the overheads of the transaction and reduce efficiency. This reduces overall effectiveness of electronic commerce as the transactions are delayed or are aborted because of the delay. There are several causes to this problem that are not addresses in the solutions that exist today.
Fraud or casual analysis of participants wastes important resources and time of counterparts. This causes the credibility of the exchange or marketplace to go down and turns away serious and legitimate participants. Effectiveness and efficiency are very important criteria in a business transaction that saves important resources for the participants giving them direct return on investment. Participants are not able to add automated process to trade with selected counterparts depending upon past effectiveness and efficiency to complete a transaction. Serious and legitimate participants are unable to add their effective and efficient business processes and practices to their competitive advantage. This is a serious shortcoming in the process of the existing electronic marketplaces. Currently, there are several marketplaces that have their own participants and work independently. If credibility is tracked uniformly and consistently across these independent marketplaces, then it adds a new value to this solution by giving an independent and a consistent rating system. Also, for the solution to become operationally useful, it needs to be non-intrusive to existing online exchanges.
Currently there are no solutions that address the above mentioned problems and shortcomings. Currently there is business, financial, and credit reporting done by tracking financial position of the business, and by tracking and analyzing accounting books. This does not depict efficiency and effectiveness with which the business has performed in business transactions. Thus they do not address shortcomings as mentioned previously. Also these reports are not real-time and thus lose value for electronic marketplaces that operate with real-time information and transactions.
Individual marketplaces present transaction reports for participants. However, they fail to track and correlate specific trade actions that give the true intention of the participant to complete the transaction. These reports fail to cover initiated but incomplete transactions. Also, the reports do not track efficiency of a participant to complete a transaction. Since, data collected, analysis, and ratings are limited to individual marketplace, they limit scope and value of the reports. Also, since these reports are not tracked independently they reduce the value.
There are some systems that ask participants to fill review applications at the end of the transaction and produce a report by analyzing reviews. However, this introduces an additional step in the process that is not directly related to the commerce. So, participants can be reluctant to fill the review and reports miss on vital data. This reduces the overall effectiveness of the analysis and ratings produced. Also, since the data collected is not based transactions but on personal opinion, credibility of the rating is largely affected and hence reduces utility.
Present invention gives a method and apparatus that addresses above mentioned shortcomings and problems. Also, it provides a completely new and unique way of identifying credibility of trade-participants. Present invention when implemented increases efficiency and effectiveness of electronic commerce and augments value of existing online exchanges. Present invention tracks trade actions at specific steps of a transaction non-intrusively across independent marketplaces, collects and analyzes the data to produce credibility ratings that disclose intention of a participant to make a successful transaction.